Social media celebrity and the institutionalization of YouTube

Abstract

This study explores the industrial underpinning and the cultural logic of social media celebrity. Social media visibility may be considered as an alternative way to fame as it bypasses the gatekeeper role played by the entertainment and mass media industries. However, the institutionalization of social media platforms like YouTube and the professionalization of amateur content creation may lead to social media becoming a new locale for industrialized celebrity manufacturing. Taking YouTube beauty vloggers as an example, this study shows that being a celebrity on social media is economically embedded in an industrial structure constituted by the platform’s business model, technical affordances, the advertising market, and commercial cultural intermediaries. Social media celebrity’s status is achieved not only through a set of affiliative, representational, and celebrification techniques, but also by engaging in meticulous entrepreneurial calculation considering the abovementioned industrial factors. This emerging industrial structure is associated with a new cultural logic of celebrity that distinguishes the fame native to social media from that on the silver screen and television. This study shows that social media celebrity is characterized by staged authenticity, managed connectedness with audience, the abundance of celebrity figures, and the cultural preoccupation with self-sufficient uniqueness.